West Point duo helps residents trap nuisance animals

If you have predators that are eating your chickens or household pets, fear not, there is a solution.

David Ellis, better known as the Yawt Yawt, specializes in hunting and trapping and many local residents have began to call on him to exterminate wild animals.

Ellis often hunts and traps with his friend J.P. Moon.

Moon works for Mossy Oak and is a retired marine, while Ellis works for the city of West Point electric department.

The two friends began hunting and trapping on Ellis’s property and the better they became at trapping, the more interested they became.

“I’ve always hunted, but I have recently began trapping for management purposes,” Ellis said. “Eventually we got good enough that people were calling for hire and stuff like that. It’s pretty cool.”

Ellis said the duo traps everything from beavers, to otters, to coyotes, boars, raccoons, etc. Locals will hire Ellis and Moon to take care of the wild animals.

“People have coyote problems where they come up and eat their cat or eat their dog,” Ellis said. “They call us and we come. If you call us, we’ll come and knock something in the head, that’s for sure.”

Even after responding to calls of nuisance animals, one extermination doesn’t necessarily fix the issue. Sometimes they come back, Ellis said.

“I went to Old Waverley last year and caught 31 animals under a man’s house, and 14 of them were skunks,” Ellis said. “He would call me every night and I’d go and catch another one.”

While Ellis and Moon mostly trap smaller animals, Ellis said the duo would not shy away from trapping larger animals.

“If Bigfoot is on your property and we can’t snatch him, we can at least slow him down,” Ellis said. “We will tell people that we are the Bigfoot and black panther specialists. We say that because people are always saying they’ve seen Bigfoot or they’ve seen a black panther.”

Ellis said it is not uncommon for people to buy the meat of animals they have trapped and killed.

“We sell raccoon meat to local people and they barbecue them up, roast them and everything else,” Ellis said. “I sell them as fast as I can get them. I also sold a few beavers for people to eat.”

While the tandem does hunt, trap, and kill the animals, Ellis insists that everything is done in an ethical and humane way.

“All of the trapping is not torture like some people think. We’ve got to be pretty humane because if landowners come out there and see something suffering, they’re like ‘no’, and when they say no, we don’t get paid, so we keep it as humane and clean as possible,” Ellis said. “I’m not disrespectful toward the animals, but I will take a quick picture of what I caught to put on social media.”

To follow Ellis or contact him regarding an animalproblem, his Facebook page is DavidEllisYawtYawt.